The Class Where Everyone Failed

I just finished a class a couple weeks ago. It was one of those small, tacked-on, online classes with very small enrollment. Because it was so very small, I taught it at reduced pay. So you can imagine I've been a tad annoyed by it since the beginning. After all, I still have to prepare everything regardless of class size, and check in every day, and do all that BS. Just for half price.

There were five students. In Week Two, two of the students submitted identical papers. The first escaped me, since it was poorly written anyway and didn't seem unusual, but the second read 5 minutes later made me realized I had almost missed plagiarism. So I reported them both.

Student A apologized for using megaessays.com, gave me the business about family deaths and sadness, and redid the assignment to show me how serious he was. Student B ignored my emails about the subject, sent emails to my superiors about my "foundless" accusations. Fine, I thought. I've told him that two events means an F for the course, so whether he talks to me or not WHO CARES. Although from this point on, he refused to talk to me in class, via email, or by phone. Which made teaching even more difficult and pissed me off to no end.

Surprise!!!  Student B plagiarized again. Of course. And refused to talk to me about it. Of course. So I failed him. (I would later find out that he defined "plagiarism" as "papers bought for money" rather than "intellectual property presented without credit as the student's own work." The latter definition appears in my course policies on the syllabus) The Dean ultimately ended up offering him either an automatic expulsion for plagiarism or an obligatory tutoring program for every class until graduation, checking him for plagiarism. (Students as Customers model, gross)

Meanwhile, Student C was struggling. She couldn't get a handle on coursework. It was her first class in 20 years. She talked a lot, but never seemed to read the assignments or the questions. Her work was mostly off topic. She got a lot of Cs and Ds. She also skipped a few assignments. So her overall average was a 58% F.

Then there is Student D, who was chugging along okay. He wasn't the shiniest coin in the basket, but he was getting middling Bs. Until he fell off the planet in the last 3 weeks of class. Including missing the Final, which is 30% of the grade. That zero dropped his middling B to a 53% F.

Student F also had some middling Bs with 2 bright and engaging A papers. Student F would have been fine, but submitted all plagiarized answers for the final exam. Again, a zero for 30% of the grade... a 58.8% F.

How did I know Student F had plagiarized? Because lo and behold, my rebound student, Student A, who had crawled back to a B, ultimately plagiarized his final exam. From a document online titled "AcademicMonkeyGerbilFinalIII" -- each answer was pretty much crap. Inconsistent sentences, some well-written work interspersed with generic nonsense. And Student A's crap answers were identical to Student F's answers, both of which were identical to this one document.

The strangest thing about that document is that I change my exam every term. So it must have been one of the five above students. Perhaps Student F continued to do his work and then posted it online, where Student A found it. Who knows what really happened. Who cares?

And this has been the story of the Class Where Everyone Failed.



AM

Ps, do not give me grief about the second chance plagiarism policy. It isn't mine, it's just my Dept of Defense BS university that pretends to be a real college experience.

College Freshman’s Automated Dorm Room Has Party and Study Settings . From Time Magazine.

In most college dorms, the most advanced pieces of technology consist of a George Foreman Grill and a glow-in-the-dark Bob Marley poster. Not so for UC Berkeley freshman Derek Low, creator of the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm (BRAD).

Everything is rigged to work either through voice commands, wireless remote or an iOS app. He even installed a motion detector to flip on all of the lights and open the automated curtain whenever he gets in from class.

The most clever thing Low did was create different settings for different situations: “Sleep mode” turns everything off while “homework mode” turns on only his desk lamp. Then there’s “romantic mode.” Now, putting aside the fact that saying the words “romantic mode” in front of someone probably isn’t the smoothest move one can make, it’s still pretty cool, involving a disco ball, drawn curtains and Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”

Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/05/01/college-freshmans-automated-dorm-room-has-party-and-study-settings/#ixzz1wO36pw9j

If It's Not Against Your Religion, Please Offer Some Comments

Fellow Bloggers and Followers Alike:

I apparently teach in a part of the country where I am against students' religion.  God's truth.  Nearly every classroom activity in which I have ever engaged with my students has at one point or another been against my students' religion.

That reading I assigned last week?

Against someone's religion.

That five-minute clip of that network television show I screened in class?

Against someone's religion.

That novel I assigned?

Against someone's religion.

That piece of artwork I showed to the class?

Against someone's religion.

That conversation we were having in class about that real world issue that's in the news right now?

Against someone's religion.

Let me be fair.  I am assembling various bits of conversation from over the years into some kind of composite classroom picture.  So it's not like all of this happened just this week.  Still, I've received comments like the above on enough occasions to surmise that somewhere there must be a religious text that portrays me--Dr. Nicholas Nothaughty--as the most sinful and evil man in all of Creation.

I'm flattered.

And confused.

See, to be even fairer, I grew up in a religious family, and I was marched off to church for all of the time that I lived with my parents.  I was also forced into a variety of religious schools in my time as a student, which means that I actually know a thing or two about this religion stuff.  Or, I at least know a thing or two about what people think they know about this religion stuff.  Moreover, I actually do struggle on occasion to mesh some loose faith-based beliefs with my somewhat nihilistic view of humanity.  All of which is to say that I don't write off overtly religious students as Bible-thumping loonies (and nor should you).

Nevertheless, I can't stand the inanity of the conversations that I have had with students who object to portions of my curriculum on religious grounds.  I also can't stand the fact that, quite frequently, I will have these conversations after the students in question walk out of my Satanic rituals (read: discussions of Mark Twain) mid-bloodletting (read: overview of comma usage).  Here's what I mean:

-Sorry, Dr. Nick, for leaving class the other day, but that television clip you showed was against my religion.

-You mean the clip from Mad Men, the award-winning television drama?  The five-minute clip that I brought in to supplement our discussions of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar?

-Yes, that clip.

-How was that clip against your religion?

-I don't believe in sex outside of marriage.

-Okay. . . There wasn't any sex in that clip, though.  I just showed the scene where Betty Draper was suffering the scrutiny of a male therapist under the direction of her husband.

-Yes, but there is sex in the show.  And I don't believe in that.

-Okay.  But you do realize that even if we watched a scene with sex in it—which is the reason that both of us exist, BTW—the show would merely be representing sex and would not be forcing you to have it.  You do realize that this is a class about representation, right?

-Yes, but I just don't believe in sex outside of a marriage.

I've had iterations of this conversation more times than I'd like to admit over the years.  I've had students request alternate books to read because they "don't believe in the subject matter in the ones that I teach."  In one case, the subject was the Vietnam War, and the book was The Things They Carried.  (Mind you, I was required to teach this particular book.   There are much better fictionalized accounts of war.)  Again, who can rationally say, "I don't believe in the Vietnam War," and why do I have to accept that lazy argumentation?

I've had to bicker with students who miss deadlines and then blame their late work on not being able to do homework between X and Y time on the two days before the assignment was due.  When I remind them that I provided the assignment in question six weeks prior to the two days prior to when the assignment was due, it comes to nothing.  If I push them, my precarious adjunct gig would come to an end because I would be a paragon of insensitivity and intolerance. 

Or, to put it the way that one of the religious counselors on my campus responded when I posed these questions to her: I would need some education.

. . .

So, anyone got any thoughts—God-fearing or demon conjuring?  I'd appreciate hearing them.

Just be gentle.  Virgin eyes and all.

P.S.  And just so we don't oversimplify things, no, not all of these students have been Christians.

Concern grows that ‘A’ stands for average.

MINNEAPOLIS — A University of Minnesota chemistry professor has thrust the U into a national debate about grade inflation and the rigor of college, pushing his colleagues to stop pretending that average students are excellent and start making clear to employers which students are earning their A’s.

“I would like to state my own alarm and dismay at the degree to which grade compression … has infected some of our colleges,” said Christopher Cramer, chairman of the Faculty Consultative Committee. “I think we are at serious risk, through the abandonment of our own commitment of rigorous academic standards, of having outside standards imposed upon us.”

National studies and surveys suggest that college students now get more A’s than any other grade even though they spend less time studying.

Cramer’s solution — to tack onto every transcript the percentage of students that also got that grade — has split the faculty and highlighted how tricky it can be to define, much less combat, grade inflation.

MORE.

Remedial classes failing to help college students.

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Each year, an estimated 1.7 million U.S. college students are steered to remedial classes to prepare them for regular coursework. But a growing body of research shows that the courses are eating up time and money, often leading not to degrees but student loan hangovers.

The expense of remedial courses, which typically cost the same as regular classes but don't fulfill degree requirements, runs about $3 billion annually, according to research by Complete College America, a Washington-based nonprofit.

The group says the classes are largely failing the nation's higher education system at a time when student-loan debt has become a presidential campaign issue. Meanwhile, lawmakers in at least two states have pushed through changes, and numerous institutions are redesigning the courses.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Remedial-classes-failing-to-help-college-students-3591153.php#ixzz1wFglmMPm

Conan the Librarian With an Early Thirsty on Being Outed.

I'm a longtime reader/lurker who's never posted anything. Or, you know, one of the Oxford Four who's bored and trying out a new identity. Fab's experience with being outed by a colleague has prompted me to action. Because I've figured out the everyday identity of one of the CM superheros. I didn't mean to, and I'm not going to use my knowledge for evil, just concerned that someone else might.

The person in question had posted something and a commenter made an innocuous reference to the poster's pseudonymously-authored blog. I had grading to avoid so I found and read the blog. From beginning to end. It was a big pile of grading. S/he mentioned hir undergraduate institution, which was also mine. And said something that made it fairly easy for someone familiar with the region to narrow down hir geographic location. And a couple of things about the size and structure of hir department, the courses s/he teaches and hir research areas. And then, well, dammit Jim, I'm a librarian not a snowflake. I couldn't help myself. It was a reference question just begging to be answered. So I did. Since then I've been wrestling with whether to alert hir. It occurs to me that I could just ask the Misery.

So my question is: would you want to know that someone (albeit someone with obsessive-compulsive search skills, but someone) put together what you've said pseudonymously to figure out who you are? Or would you just find it annoying, or creepy?

If the person I've identified answers that s/he would want to know, I'll e-mail hir, from my real identity to hirs, and explain what tipped me off.

It Used to Be Part of Our Jobs. Now It's Rude. Or Disrespectful. Or Humiliating.

I remember a time, not so very long ago, when making mistakes, getting advice about how not to repeat them, and following that advice was a part of what we called learning. Poring over my course evaluations for the past year in preparation for my self-evaluation, thinking about comments from my evals last year, and recalling some of the stellar professional development opportunities Large Urban Community College has provided me recently have all led me to the conclusion that many of today's students and educationists now recoil with horror at the thought of any correction being part of the learning process. Here's a list of things my professors routinely did, and I also do, that are now considered abusive:

• Using red ink to comment on student papers.
• Making too many comments or corrections.
• Telling students where to find information rather than repeating it for the fifth time.
• Informing students they must follow directions.
• Reprimanding students privately for not following directions and making them aware that they will fail the class if they also fail to follow directions on subsequent major assignments.
• Recommending tutoring to students.
• Calling on students in class who don't have their hands raised.
• Directing students who claim to have disabilities to contact the disability office to get their conditions documented so I can legally make accommodations.
• Asking students who say "I don't understand" to be more specific about what part of the assignment they don't understand.
• Requiring students to be responsible for keeping track of their own grades and averages.
• Refusing to give study guides or extra credit but providing students with tips for note-taking and test-taking which mirror the techniques they should have learned in their mandatory "student success" classes.

Somehow I survived all this abuse and came out of it as an educated person.  Maybe I need therapy because I'm obviously suppressing educational trauma.

What other rude behaviors can you add to this list?

Tea Partying Good Times

Greetings Miserians.

I haven't posted in ages, and apologize for not holding up my end of the conversation. I've almost posted a few times, then didn't because I haven't wanted to relive the suckage. But I've been drinking this evening and have changed my mind. Some highlights from the past couple of terms:

1. Vice Presidential Substance put on administrative leave; college discovers that his budgeting skills nothing more than magical thinking. On the down side, it means about $30,000 less in my budget. On the plus side, no more comments about my lovely hair, eyes and skin during meetings with him, **shudder**. Someone remind me, what decade are we in?

2. Had a temporary adjunct teaching a couple of classes who was flat out loony tunes. I had a line of students out the door complaining about hir methods of instruction in Badger Baiting. During one class session, I overheard these shrill screeching noises coming from hir classroom. I snuck into the back of the class and observed: s/he was having the 'flakes dance...yes, dance...out interpretations of Badger Basketry to some kind of Klingon opera with haunted house sound effects. Or something like that. I guess I should clarify: s/he was dancing out h/ir interpretation of Badger Basketry. I later asked her how that fit into the Badger Baiting curriculum, which, I reminded hir, was what s/he had been enlisted to teach. S/he said--oh hell, never mind. There wasn't a good answer there.

Um, no. We won't be renewing that contract.

Saturday Sippy: A question on Ethics

First, I would like to propose something smaller than a Big Thirsty. Why? I'm not terribly thirsty, just curious. The weekends often seem to calm down here, and I propose a Saturday Sippy--like a wine tasting, but for general teaching/pedagogical inquiries. I want a sip, not a guzzle a la Big Thirsty.

My Saturday Sippy is this: Is it ethical to only have high-stakes assignments (i.e. midterm and final only, homework recommended/small portion of grade) rather than more of a hand-holding style classroom (daily graded homework, frequent quizzes, in addition to examinations)? Without outing myself, the traditional pedagogy in my field leans more towards hand-holding. The truth behind my question is that I don't want to work any longer/harder than absolutely necessary to do the minimum for my new, more autonomous and shittier paying job.

Since When Are We Supposed to Be Equal?

With our nifty new student evaluation system, we now get our results just two days after grades are due.  Since it's all online and strictly voluntary, we are, in essence, operating our own version of The Site That Shall Not Be Named. Only those who really loved or hated their professors feel compelled to respond.

This is our fourth go-round with this system, and one comment I keep getting (usually one per section) that sticks in my craw is some variation on the following:

"She expected us to be perfect and never gave us leeway on anything. But then it was OK if she did whatever she wanted."

This really pisses me off. Other than the term my brother died, I have never turned back a paper late, meaning past the stated grading parameters within the syllabus. I really don't think that a max of 10 days is unreasonable (and that's 10 real days, not business days).  There have been times when I've said I'd have them done earlier and then not been able to do so, but I've always provided an explanation, and that explanation has always been directly related to the other parts of my job at Large Urban Community College.  If, for example, I'd blocked off an afternoon for grading but hear my dean wants an emergency meeting with my department, I have to go to that. If I get selected to present at a conference and funds come through, I'll be doing that.  I am about to the point where I'm going to quit telling them anything about when I'll turn papers back. It bites me in the butt every time.

I also tell my students they have an emergency out clause they can use one time per term.  Again, it's on the syllabus, that thing they never can read.  I tell them I decide whether it's an emergency.  "Got called into work at the last minute," "Kid got sick," or "Grandpa died" are all good examples of an emergency. "I forgot," "I had another paper due," or "I don't have Internet access" (my college has a technology policy that requires online students to have it unless there's a massive city power outage) are not. I don't see it as being all that different from a job.

The most insidious part of this to me, however, is the assumption that somehow their role as student and my role as professor are equal. I've already been a college student, not just once but three times with three degrees. The last time I checked, I was the one assigning grades and setting policies for the class. The management of the class is my job. As an employee of the Urban Community College System, I have rights and responsibilities that students do not.  I do what I can to reduce barriers between us so I'm approachable, but that doesn't mean they are my peers. I can, for example, take sick or personal days. As long as I ensure my work gets done and my classes are covered, it's none of the students' business.  My college system says that if I have service duties which pop up at the same time as scheduled office time, I don't have to make up my office hour. I always do anyway. What does that get me? "She was always moving her office hour" (as if they were going to show up!).

I can just imagine what these people are going to be like as employees.  "Why does the boss get four weeks of vacation and I only get two? Why does he have a corner office and I have a cubicle? We both work the same number of hours. I should be making the same as she does!"

Quebec protests spread

Bill 78 is challenged in court
Everyone gets in on the act
Quebec Education department employees supporting students

This protest has legs.  When it began, it was about tuition; but now it's about the draconian and anti-Charter legislation passed in haste to quell the demonstrations, and middle-class, middle-aged professionals have been taking to the streets as well to protest that.  There have been mass arrests for the last two nights, which is reminding everyone of phenomenally unpopular legislation back in the 1970's (the War Measures Act).  Charest (the premier)'s support is plummeting.

Thou shalt not Tweet

I've been enjoying life after deanship, teaching and writing and attending conferences and (gasp!) skipping meetings. One could get used to this.

Yesterday we had a mass mailing to all faculty. The Powers that Be have determined that Facebook and Twitter are the devil incarnate. They have decreed that effective immediately we are not allowed to use Facebook and/or Twitter or "similar services" because of the privacy issues involving these companies.

Now, I'm all for privacy and educating people about not posting pictures of themselves in an advanced state of inebriation in public, but this is ridiculous. There was apparently a spate of abuse directed to the administration, because a few hours later it was made clear that only the use of school computers was meant, one can use private devices if one wants. Apparently, the PR department went ballistic, as they have an active Twitter account and have been trying to build up a "fan page" on Facebook for quite some time. They sent around a notice we could all put on our course Facebook pages. No idea how to attach that to I tweet, though.

And how this affects the Great March of E-Learning that was declared a while back, in which we had to incorporate "modern" technology into all of our courses, remains to be seen.

Me? I'll just carry on. I'm betting the administration couldn't figure out if I twitter or not if their lives depended on it.

An Online Website That Takes Tweets And Turns Them Into Sonnets. Why Don't I Just Go Fucking Kill Myself Now?

Pentametron.

When it's Time to Say Goodbye, you Never See it Coming but the Flag is Still Passed to You and Your Job is to Keep it Safe, but What a Responsibility that is on Your Shoulders to do Your Part to Help Keep Society Afloat

Relevance to CM:  Keep reading, but I think the title explains most of it.

I received word, at approximately 0430, this morning, that my Aunt Virginia had passed on last night.  She was a very sweet lady who welcomed everyone into her home, saw that they were fed, and always made an ear available for their troubles.  She always had something wise and/or witty that cheered me up.  While she had never taught in a classroom, she always had this way of redirecting my anxieties about teaching situations.

And now... she's gone.  She was 94 years old.  One will point out that it was just "her time", and yes I'm grateful for such a long life she had lived, but that never makes it easy to lose someone like that.  In fact, it makes it incredibly more difficult.

Aunt Virginia was a part of society's backbone.  I've seen the world around me and continue to get increasingly disturbed by what I see.  Over the past several months, I've seen various role-models from my generation continue to drop like flies.

I would like to pose a question:  What does one do when they've all gone, there's no-one left to look up to, and you're all alone?

Big Thirsty: What Don't Students Spend Money on, But Should?

We had some interesting discussion a few days ago of how students waste money, so I thought I'd turn the question around: what don't students spend money on that they really should?

I'll provide a few answers of my own below; please chime in with additional ones (or objections to mine, or the way I've worded/formatted/named the Thirsty, or whatever) in the comments.

• Textbooks.  If I've named specific chapters that you should read in preparation for particular classes, and/or keep writing things like "see Jones for more on approaches to hamster-fur felting" in assignments, YES, YOU NEED TO BUY THE TEXTBOOK! (sorry; can you tell I've answered a few emails on this subject lately?)  

• Time -- time to study, time to eat right and exercise and sleep and generally consolidate/reflect on your learning.  Maybe even time to have a life while you're preparing for life.  Time is, unfortunately, an expensive commodity, and I can't really recommend taking out student loans in the current economy.  So maybe this is one you pay for with scheduling/lifestyle decisions: attend the local CC and/or live at home if necessary, start out with a 6-year rather than a 4-year plan, whatever it takes.  

• Tech devices appropriate to the job at hand.  To complete the work in my writing (and research and reading)-intensive classes, you do need a working computer (or maybe a really good tablet) with a decent-sized screen and internet connectivity and reasonably up-to-date (but not necessarily cutting-edge) software (and/or you need to take a bit of time to identify and download free programs that play well with the more expensive standard ones, e.g. Open Office).  Most 5-10-year old lap- or desktops, or a cheap new netbook, will do just fine.  You don't need a smartphone with a data plan (and if you try to read scholarly articles on that little screen, you're going to make life much, much more difficult for yourself).   

• An automatic data back-up plan.  Actually, you can get this, too, for free, though you'll have limited storage space.  But for the cost of one or two coffee drinks a month, you can back up all of your important digital belongings using any of half-a-dozen reliable, set-it-and-forget-it (but do check up on it now and then) cloud backup systems that work very, very well.   You can also access your files from anywhere, even that %#@! smartphone. 

Hmm. . .I seem to keep straying back into "don't spend money on this" territory.  Can any of you do any better, or are the two subjects inextricably intertwined?

Hiram is - Briefly - Not Baffled About Something.

Big like Tingle; blurry like Cal.

 

Like I imagine most of you do, I spend a good deal of time thinking, "Why are my students so fucking stupid?"

They do so many idiotic things, give such patently ridiculous excuses, shift blame for their fuckups to so many people.

But last night, at my brother-in-law's request, I watched three back to back episodes of A&E's "Parking Wars," a tv show about parking enforcement, car booters, and impound lot specialists.

What I discovered is that everyone is fucking stupid.

In these episodes there was such a torrent of idiots that I kept thinking it had to be a prank show. One guy parks his car in front of a hydrant, facing the wrong way, with two tires on the curb. The meter person was filling out the tickets when he returned and he said, "What the fuck are you doing? I just went in the restaurant to get a sandwich. Don't you see my blinkers on?"

The Current World Break-Down (UAW Activists Prosecuted and Police Brutality at UC Berkely)

Quebec!

May 22, 2012- MONTREAL

A protest that organizers are describing as the single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history choked the streets of downtown Montreal. "By 3:30 p.m., a little more than 90 minutes after the marches began to snake their way through downtown Montreal, CLASSE, which would later estimate the crowd at about 250,000, described the march as "the single biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Montreal police, refuse publicly to estimate crowd size."

Breaking News: College students spending less time studying.

WASHINGTON - Over the past half-century, the amount of time college students actually study - read, write, and otherwise prepare for class - has dwindled from 24 hours a week to about 15, survey data show.

And that invites a question: Has college become too easy?

Ashley Dixon, a sophomore at George Mason University, anticipated more work in college than in high school. Instead, she has less. In a typical week, Dixon spends 18 hours in classes and another 12 in study. All told, college course work occupies 30 hours of her week. Dixon is a full-time student, but college, for her, is a part-time job.

“I was expecting it to be a lot harder,’’ said Dixon, 20. “I thought I was going to be miserable, trying to get good grades. And I do get good grades, and I’m not working very hard.’’

Declining study time is a discomfiting truth about the vaunted US higher-education system. The trend is generating debate over how much students really learn, even as colleges raise tuition every year.

Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy. Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them with athletics, clubs, and climbing walls on campuses that increasingly resemble resorts.

FULL STORY.

PS: If you send us an article at 2:45 am, and it has not yet appeared on the page by 4:15 am, it doesn't make us "detached" and "indifferent" to the readers. It means we're fucking asleep.

The rant I wish I could have said to Flakey McFlakerson

Listen up Flakey McFlakerson. You tried so hard? You need to graduate? This is your best work?

I am a hell of a lot older than you. You know what that means? It means I've seen better. You're young and you think you know everything about the world. I'm here to tell you that most of your professors, adjuncts, and TAs have seen better work than your best.

I've had better students. I've heard better and more legitimate excuses. I know you're lying to me because you can't even look me in the eyes and tell me the bullshit coming out of your mouth with a straight face. You are a liar.

As you get older Flakey McFlakerson, you'll find that some partners are better than others. It's just polite that you don't tell them straight up that their skills are sub-par. It's also polite if you don't ask how you stack up against the former ones; you probably don't want to hear the truth. The same goes for life in college.

Talk about starving artists!

Yes, Professors Work Hard, But ...

So the problem isn't that college professors don't work hard--clearly most do. The problem is that the working lives they lead more closely resemble the working lives of writers, artists, and musical composers than they do of the working lives of other upper-middle-class professionals: odd hours and feast-or-famine working schedules; bursts of creative intensity punctuated by relative idleness, long periods that can strike outsiders as unproductive but that actually generate intense creativity down the road. Someone--students, parents, taxpayers, managers of university endowments--has to pay for this sort of lifestyle, of course. Someone has to judge whether one of its end results--reams of scholarship that, as Mark Bauerlein has argued on Minding the Campus--may be "superb" in quality but seldom gets read or cited--is worth all the expenditures and the apparent waste.

Dumbass Alert.

Burning text books could be cause of frat house fire

RUSTON, LA (KSLA) -

Burning text books may have been the cause of the fire that burned down the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house at Louisiana Tech in Ruston Saturday afternoon.

"I think some of the guys that were maybe doing an end of year celebration and burning some books or whatever, so we'll look into that," says Sophomore and Pi Kappa Alpha president John Chestnut.

Fire investigators will be looking for evidence that burning books were the source of the blaze, and confirm they have been told where it may have started. "Law enforcement was told that someone had started a fire in the chimney, whether to cook or for whatever reason, I don't know," says Ruston Police Department Lt. Tim Parker.

MORE

Pam From Pawtucket Prepares Her Parachute.

I was on the market in 2008, the year that everything collapsed. Three times in one month (!) I was invited on campus interviews where, within a week of my scheduled visit, the search was canceled because the economy was suddenly fucked. In the end, maybe only a dozen t-t jobs went through in my field that year. And it’s not a tiny field.

So I was lucky that I got hired! It was a “rising star” private school, in a decent city (albeit in a part of the country in which I never thought I’d want to live), with great benefits and double the salary of my VAP position. I was lucky!

And, this spring, I resigned. It seems that a competitive job market, in this case, translates directly to “we will work you until you die.”

In part, I resigned due to the fact that the tenure publishing standards at my school were higher than those at the R1 at which I was a VAP. At the R1, I taught a 2/2/0, and tenure was a book. Here, I taught a 3/4, with at least 5 preps a year, and tenure was 10 - 12 articles (books didn’t count; yes, that’s a thing). The last person to get tenure in my department, incidentally, did so while ringing in the millennium.

From Fab.

If you've been online in the past hour or so you likely saw the post from "Jeremiah on a Jihad" who posted my real name and institution.

Cal happened to be online when it happened, and took the post down and gave me a call.

The person had requested posting rights yesterday, had identified himself as a prof in the southeast, and had used a hotmail account. The IP address Cal tracked for the post did come from my institution, so it was someone who works with me.

When I started CollegeMisery.com back in June of 2010, I only told 2 people at my college I was doing it. These are longtime friends, and I know that neither would wait 2 years to out me. Likely someone else found out on his/her own, or maybe one of my pals mentioned it in passing.

I am not embarrassed about being the moderator of this page. I'm not ashamed of what we do. But for my own reasons I've chosen to be pseudonymous, like most of the community members. Honestly, I don't have any "fear" about being outed. I do think, however, that some current or future students might not understand my involvement with the page, because it's been my experience that students fail to see the difference between us being annoyed at the snowflake generation and us being annoyed at them individually, personally.

So, that was a shitty thing for "Jeremiah" to do, and I'd encourage him/her to contact me directly at school if he/she wants to register some kind of problem. I'm happy to talk about the page to that person, and I hold no ill will.

Fab

Department of Omnishambles

Department of Omnishambles, Faculty of the Inhumanities

Great academicians dealing with real academy issues. As Kierkegaard says,

"When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love. Having said that, I really wanted to blow someone’s brains out when my painstaking restructuration of the examination timetable for the 2nd year undergraduate philosophy imploded due to a mislabelling of room availability on the 29th. Total clusterfuck."

Right up our alley.

From TexasInsider.com.

Texas Trounces the Left’s War on History

2nd  in Continuing Series: New Book documents how Texas high school history students preparing for college… reject the indoctrination of academia

By Bill Ames

This article is the introduction to the left’s overall war on America’s traditional values & culture. It’s a tale of how this larger war relates to the left’s War on History in Texas’ public schools.

Many of us have heard the story about the religious, politically conservative parents who brought up their daughter to love God and America.  Then she goes off to college.  After just one semester, she comes home and announces that she hates both.  

Thanks to conservative members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), supported by hundreds of mainstream Texans, Texas high school graduates will be better equipped to reject the indoctrination agenda of leftist college professors. 

The reason: In 2010, the SBOE created a balanced social studies standards framework.

The battle fought to develop these standards is well documented in my new book, TEXAS TROUNCES THE LEFT’S WAR ON HISTORY. 

The SBOE standards teach our students that America’s good far outweighs her bad, that our Founding Principles, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our strong roots in Western Civilization, our work ethic, and our free market economy are the basis for 200-plus years of America’s greatness and leadership in the world. 

These principles will be the foundation for teaching U.S. history in Texas’ public schools for the next ten years.

The Rest.

Flip This!

When students don’t show up to office hours (ha, ha, students showing up to office hours!) I often find myself hunkering down to read all about new innovations in edutainment. It seems that the Big Idea making the rounds these days is the so-called “flipped classroom,” which as I understand it basically means posting one or more video lectures to the Interwebz for students to watch before class, giving them an online quiz to self-check their comprehension, and then using class time to build on those basic concepts through various awesomely engaging activities that never in any way whatsoever remind anyone of the dread monster Lecture. (For an exhaustive discussion of the flipped classroom, check out this bell-and-whistle show of a blog post.)

I admit that I panicked a little the first time I realized that the flipped classroom was a thing. Since I’ve transitioned from teaching Gerbil to native squeakers of Hamster – a kind of classroom environment that is pretty interactive by nature – to teaching courses more amenable to the lecture-discussion-exam trifecta, I’ve worried that my new classes lack some hidden, powerful dynamism that I was not trained to unlock.

This notion has endured beyond my initial introduction to the concept, with plenty of coverage from multiple disciplines and angles. But none of the transformative rhetoric casting a saintly halo around the flipped classroom has addressed some very basic questions that have surely occurred to every reader of this blog:

30 Days.

Dharun Ravi sentenced to jail in Rutgers webcam case

• 
• Comments

  137

• Email

  Share

By Tina Susman

A judge Monday sentenced a former Rutgers University student, Dharun Ravi, to 30 days in jail for spying on his gay roommate who later committed suicide, rejecting defense arguments that he did not deserve time behind bars but disappointing prosecutors who portrayed him as insensitive and driven by anti-gay bias.

Ravi, who is now 20, had faced 10 years in prison after being convicted last March of invasion of privacy, witness tampering, tampering of evidence, and the hate crime of bias intimidation. He was also sentenced to 300 hours of community service.

The jury had concluded that Ravi had targeted his roommate, Tyler Clementi, because Clementi was gay, and the bias-crime status virtually guaranteed he would get some prison time.

Meet the kids who were paid to drop out. From 60 Minutes.

Having a moment ....

OK ... I know we're supposed to share "yer pain".

And, I'm aware the name of the blog is College Misery ...

BUT ... I'm having a rare "life doesn't (totally) suck" moment.

Yes, I did just get a letter today from the IRS about that "little" amount I owe them.

And, earlier, I did have to address an online student's stunningly misinformed comprehension of wombat emotional health.

But ... right now, I'm on my back porch, basking in a cool evening breeze (after a pleasantly warm day). I'm grilling a nice piece of meat, with a decent adult beverage in my hand. My SO is watching the mini miscreants riding their bikes on a fortunate cul-de-sac (city maintained) adjacent to our little plot of land which (unusually) abuts to the rear, not the back of the adjacent street, but a strip of trees.

Yeah, if you walk through the house you will sense it was bought on a post-grad school shoestring, constructed by architecture school dropouts, and the street looks like Archie Bunker's neighborhood - but I'm on my back porch ...dammit!

And at midnight tonight the second-to-last week of a quarter will end, so a crap pile of final papers (or lame ass excuses) will be overflowing my in box tomorrow morning ...

OK ... cool breeze ... grilling ... (now more) adult beverage ... (clinging to) ahh, the moment.

These Are Some Suggested Glossary Terms. We Post Them In Order to Let Our 9 Readers Look Them Over. We Add Glossary Terms Only When Their Usage or Potential Usage Demands It. Clever Defs Help, of Course, But You Can't Believe How Little We Think of So-Called "Cleverness" Generally.

Caring Disability
1. Often confused for an actual learning disability and often exhibited by slowflakes who just can't come up with documentation for the Disabilities office.

Retention Deficit Disorder (RDD)
1. Illness specific to institutions often characterized by student flakeyness. Symptoms include but are not limited to under-enrolled sections, students quitting at the first sign of homework, Dean's firing instructors for flunking students, instructors engaging in pan-handling.

Zombie
1. A faculty member with a wild, raging idea that is usually pointless (but nonetheless political and/or troublesome) who subsequently spreads disease throughout the department with infectious gossip, arm twisting, disemboweling, eating of brains, etc. Usually, those unfortunate enough to find themselves cornered by a zombie report hearing guttural moans followed by attempts at infection and the surprise appearance of other zombies, seemingly from out of nowhere. Frequently, zombie apocalypses lead to the end of civilization as we know it, faculty meetings. Usually the emergence of zombies results in survivors banding together to win the day, or, if infection spreads too quickly, survivors huddling together in the janitor's closet (i.e., the adjunct office). Usually patient zero is a gumdrop unicorn or a silverback.

Disappearing Student

Why is it that the student who is so desperate to "fix" his grade by handing in "forgotten" work that "I know he did; he showed it to me" that he sends me three emails in the space of five minutes disappears the moment I reply "okay, send it along right away by return email; there might still be time to change the grade before the registrar's site makes it final"?  The email system suddenly developed a serious time lag, or my message fell into a time/space warp, or something along those lines, right? 

P.S.  Hope he doesn't read CM., since this falls under the category of real-time blogging.  On the other hand, given the time of year, what are the chances that several dozen, if not hundreds, of proffies out there had a similar experience today?  I guess the only question is whether those proffies, like me, are a little too soft (and/or weighed the options of finishing the matter vs. dealing with whining emails and possibly a grade challenge over the coming weeks, and decided in favor of finishing the matter).  In any case, it beats hitting "refresh" on my inbox.  Stupid me; I thought he was actually going to send it.

Weekend Twin Thirsty! Signing the Syllabus

Weekend Twin Thirsty!
Thank you; I'll have another!

Q1: Is signing the syllabus really that important. I've asked other colleagues and get conflicting viewpoints all-around. My inclination is that telling them that I need a signature actually undermines my authority, when enrolling in the course ought to be enough to count as a "signature".

Q2: And if they do sign it, and everything including the date and their student ID number is illegible and they insist that their handwriting is that way, or they just refuse to sign, what then? Yeah, suppose they refuse to cooperate...?

A: Be specific dammit!

Amazing!

I know we've discussed this before, but WHY do students plagiarize? Well, I guess I know why, but why do they plagiarize so stupidly? Do they really believe I am that dumb (don't answer that)?

Every semester, I discuss plagiarism with my students. I give them handouts explaining what plagiarism is, I lecture them on it, I put "Don't Plagiarize!" on the assignment instructions. I do this when I hand out the assignments and in short little mini-lectures as the due date draws near. I even tell them the stories of my dumbest plagiarism cases: "Can you believe a student in a past class cut-and-pasted the Wikipedia article and thought I wouldn't notice??" We all laugh together over how dumb that was, and they agree they would never, ever do anything like that.

And then they do.

This semester I caught three. Three wiki papers. Of course it was easier than usual because they all used the same article. As usual, confusion and denial: "I didn't realize it! I made a mistake! I forgot to put the quotes in! Oops!"And then, my favorite: "This is impossible! I didn't even look at the internet! I've never even seen that article, ever!"

Yes, fellow Miserians, it is an end-of-the-semester miracle. MAGIC INTERNET RAYS traveled through the air and into my student's brain, causing him to reproduce, WORD-FOR-WORD, the wikipedia article on his topic. That's the only plausible explanation. Maybe we should alert the press. Or one of those cable shows that investigate amazing supernatural phenomena.

Meanwhile, I'm going to put tinfoil hats on next semester's syllabus, because otherwise this could become an epidemic.

Ah, now you tell me!

Too good not to share, from a recent student essay:

"Sweet Sixteen usually brings with it a great big panty and some experience."

Wombat of the Copier Sends Out Some Email!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ex-adjunct says she was fired for views. From Lohud.Com

A former adjunct professor is suing Westchester Community College after, she said, the school fired her after she revealed her support for Arizona’s controversial 2010 immigration law in class, among other opinions.

A lawyer for Carol Leitner, 68, describes a suffocating atmosphere of political correctness at the school in the lawsuit, saying that policies for faculty outlined in the student handbook “impose a degree of academic censorship that is unheard of at a public college.”

The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in White Plains.

FULL ARTICLE.

we're all tea-partied when this kid makes it to university

So remember that scene in the Rodney Dangerfield classic Back to School where he gets Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper on Kurt Vonnegut?

Well, some dumbass up here in Canadia tried to do pretty much that that with a Sean Dixon book assigned for a grade 11 class.  First, they contacted a reviewer they found on the internet.  The reviewer tweeted about it. The author saw the tweet...and the rest is a hella awesome blog post, titled "The kid who was supposed to read my book".  The Globe and Mail has now picked up the story, ensuring that an appropriate amount of ridicule will ensue.

While I encourage you to read the whole blog entry, I ask you: who among us hasn't wanted to smack the Flakey McFlakersons who keep asking us to do the work for them just like this?

"All you have to do is use your powers—the same powers you use to seek help from half of the internet including the author of the fucking book! All you have to do is use those powers to interpret the exercise you've been given in a way that makes you able to do it!"

Use your powers, indeed. Kudos, Mr. Dixon.